Great Big Protest

I hope my readers had a good weekend. Travalon and I decided on Friday to save some money by having fish at home, but then we saw that the Parched Eagle, a little brewpub near our house, was having live music, so we went over there to hear a really good bluegrass band. Now I don’t feel bad when professional musicians are better than I am, since they have dedicated their lives to music and I am something of a dilettante, but these guys all had day jobs and yet they were way better than I am. The mandolin player was not very sober, and he still played way better than I do, and it goes without saying that their fiddler was better than I am. (She was also much taller.) Sometimes I feel a little bad, thinking that maybe if I practiced more, I could be good myself, but then our band hasn’t had practice in a month so there you go. How will we ever improve?

Saturday morning I made omelets for Travalon and myself, then we went downtown to check out the big protest. As my regular readers no doubt remember, I posted quite a bit about the protests in 2011 against Act 10, but this dwarfed any of those. We didn’t actually march, since I wasn’t in agreement with the whole pro-choice vibe of the march, but it was fun being in the midst of it all. The protest was peaceful with lots of clever signs, like “We shall overcomb!” After that we went to the Sugar River Distillery for Mamastep’s birthday party. It was a big one, but I won’t say which one, except to say she had a huge, very pretty black holographic balloon with the number in silver on it. Way too much food, including fry bread tacos and white Russian cake. I hadn’t realized it was a potluck, but Mamastep said, “Don’t worry – there’s plenty of food!” We played a game called Exploding Kittens, and I gave the birthday girl a flask that says something like, “I foresee the opportunity to make lots of bad choices!” It was a really fun day, and we got lots of exercise walking all over downtown, plus the weather was so unseasonably warm. It felt good to be outside for most of the day.

Yesterday Travalon and I joined Cecil Markovitch and Richard Bonomo at a pancake breakfast at St. James church after Mass, then we went home and watched that very sad game. The whole first half it was like the Packers hadn’t even shown up to play. However, a close loss might have been worse because then we would have thought of how close we had gotten to the Super Bowl, and does it really matter anyway? Whoever won is just going to lose to the stupid Patriots, although I will be pulling for Atlanta to beat them and finally win their first Super Bowl. To cheer up, Travalon and I went to see the movie Moana, and I recommend everyone see this movie. It was so wonderful! The animation is gorgeous, and the story about a young girl finding the courage to save her people is compelling. It makes me want to go to the South Pacific myself – how about right now?

Famous Hat